Negotiating Accountability for Atrocities in East Timor 1974-1999

This thesis is a case-study offering new research on collective responses to atrocities. It applies sociolegal analysis to the lesser-known case of accountability for atrocities committed in East Timor between 1974 and 1999. The notion that impunity for atrocity crimes cannot be tolerated animated the field of international criminal justice in the 1990s, as manifested in a string of new international and hybrid criminal tribunals. Yet, although the case of East Timor is contemporaneous with the global field’s emergence, it sits at a distance from this development. Internationally supported crimes against humanity trials held in post-conflict East Timor were under-resourced, did not try any high level perpetrator, and were soon shut down. Against this backdrop, field theory inspired by Pierre Bourdieu is deployed to explain what, if not the field of international criminal justice, shaped accountability in this specific case.

Timor-Leste is a country that emerged from Portuguese colonisation, Indonesian occupation and United Nations administration. As a case of international criminal justice, this history renders it distinctive because the negotiation of accountability was from the outset inseparable from the struggle over self-determination and the creation of State. Key actors and agents charged a field of power between them as they sought to influence East Timor’s future. These actors are identified as the Timorese Resistance/State, the United Nations, Indonesia, Portugal, Australia, the United States, and civil society. Drawing on interviews, as triangulated with historical, legal and academic sources, the analysis charts relational dynamics through the periods of occupation, transition, and independence. It demonstrates the influence of the transnational field of power in devaluing the anti-impunity principle championed by practitioners and advocates of international criminal justice. As such, the thesis delivers a case-based analysis of the interplay between the field of power and the field of international criminal justice.

The thesis is organised in seven chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 introduce the research rationale and
approach. Chapter 3 provides a historical account and Chapter 4 critically analyses the avenues of
responsibility under international law that actors and agents did not pursue. Chapter 5 traces shifting power dynamics over time, showing how a brief destabilisation of established relations in 1999 opened a space for justice. Chapter 6 concretises through events and cases how that space was gradually closed. Finally, Chapter 7 synthesises the relations over time to answer the key research question of how engaged actors and agents shaped accountability for atrocities committed in East-Timor.